1889: A Klonas affair
An out-of-the-ordinary loan from Chinuk Wawa into English:
Navy Yard Puget Sound, 1910 (image credit: Wikipedia)
Klonas = t’ɬúnas = ‘maybe’.
You see, published dictionaries of Chinook Jargon at the time often translated this word as ‘doubtful’.
So the writer meant this word in the following as ‘dubious; uncertain; unclear’.
Although used as a modifying adjective in the English-language setting below, that’s not a meaning that t’ɬúnas (a discourse marker / a particle showing the speaker’s attitude) ever had in CJ.
But, it’s not rare for Chinuk Wawa loanwords into Pacific NW English to have changed their “syntactic class”.
(Their “part of speech” category.)
A verb such as potlatch ‘give’ could become a noun for ‘party’.
An adverb/quantifier such as hiyu could become a noun for ‘party’.
(Do you see a theme in Settler culture here?)
So here’s today’s tiny but precious gem for you:
Expressed in classical Chinook, the definite location of the Navy Yard is a Klonas affair.
— from the Olympia (WA) Washington Standard of February 22, 1889, page 3, column 1
From growing up here in Washington, I only know of naval yards in the Bremerton, Kitsap County, area.
Maybe in 1889 folks were wrangling over where those facilities were going to be built!
